People “go dark” mostly from erotic troubles. The withdrawal is not the same as grieving the death of a loved one or despairing when you yourself are ill. It’s not the same as Broadway going dark during COVID. A lover’s betrayal sets off a systemwide alarm: the ultimate firewall of intimacy has been breached; it wasn’t a school of endorphins that swum in but one lethal viral contaminant, the Terminator Virus. Your traumatized psyche doesn’t know what to do but flip the master switch, stopping cold every kind of engagement, not just engagement in the arena that has betrayed you, whether that arena is everything associated with one person or half the country’s voters.

The first thing I think about when I go dark on “news” is that millions of Americans live their lives this way. There’s no stopping the election aftermath from seeping into the social media world of fun, so if you want a complete blackout, you have to temporarily quit the fun. But for most of the country, the seepage of news into their TikTok or Instagram fun is the only way they are informed about the activities of government at all.

This year has seen unprecedented failures in legacy media, the roots extending back to Trumpism’s ugly landing in 2015. The two names that stand out for me during the Trump ascendancy are prestigious writers who seriously tarnished their legacies: Walter Isaacson with his despicably fawning book on Elon Musk and Michael Lewis with his equally starstruck book on Sam Bankman Fried. On the other end of the spectrum is the mediocre analytics of Maggie Haberman, with her sanitized and platitudinous Trump reporting for the New York Times, and New York Magazine writer Olivia Nuzzi—someone relatively few had read before having their feeds fill up with her glamour shots—who worked to legitimize the creepy conspiracy theorist RFK Jr. Only one of these four interviewees is in jail. The other three will be running the country.

As a basis of comparison, the American journalist Dorothy Thompson interviewed Hitler in 1931 and the following year published a book about the danger he posed to Europe and the world. She did not engage in either access journalism or the thirties equivalent of asking for dick pics. On August 25, 1934, she was given 24 hours to leave the country—the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany.

Going dark in the time of 24/7 is difficult, but most of us have done it before. The first Trump administration was all about darkness. The Washington Post branded itself under the banner “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” and the mainstream media behaved as if this statement was some kind of ethical pace car. But that was when Trump’s loss in the popular vote allowed us the illusion that he was a fluke. It allowed us to defer any national reckoning with the true character of the American electorate. Now, finally, we realize that Trump 1 was like the gray, troubling morning Herman Melville sets for us in the novella Benito Cereno: “Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.” This time we can’t look away from the fact that the man who campaigned on hate and the abuse of power won the popular vote and is thus popular.

There are always those who see incentive and an odd kind of liberation in ruinous defeat. The magazine editor Grace Mirabella wrote something on the death of her father that I’ve always found wise: “There is something liberating about having your worst fears come true; you realize that you have no choice left but to survive, and that surviving for survival is the best antidote to fear.” But now that I’m here in this survival situation, I realize it will require having a succession of your worst fears come true, like the back and forth heaving of an accordion.

Perhaps what going dark most helps me to avoid is political reporters, pundits, and columnists who believe that having thoughts for legacy publications is somehow more important to the preservation of democracy than canvassing door-to-door to prevent a dictator from having a Day One. How foolish were those Harris-Walz volunteers who lined up in Manhattan to take buses into the heart of darkness that lie within Bucks County, Pennsylvania! Right now these pundits are busy, busy, busy beating up the Democrats, finessing their own theory of why everyone got it wrong, and being bossy-pants to party operatives. All the while, a skulking penitence is expected of Democrats in Congress. The proposition that uninformed people unhappy with their lives will vote out whoever’s currently in office is just not a fun Big Theory to contemplate.

Nationally and globally, we were in a very bad place before the election, and I went into this stressful runup worried about the sinister maneuverings of the world’s biggest corporations and the insane resource demands of AI. A September report by the International Trade Union Confederation accused the lobbying arms of Amazon, Tesla, Meta, ExxonMobil, Blackstone, Vanguard, and Glencore of undermining democracy by funding far-right candidates, exacerbating the climate crisis, and violating trade union and human rights. We already had massive electricity demands with crypto mining; with AI we have an unconscionable increase in demand for electricity (which could double by 2026), for water (to cool down computing equipment in data centers, many of them absurdly built in desert regions), and for the carbon-intensive mining of materials.

Since the election, I haven’t even gone back to those worries as they conveniently come frontloaded into the president-elect and his regime-in-waiting. The first time around we thought of his lackeys as inept and possibly dangerous; this time we know them to be set on committing crimes clearly itemized in the 900-page documentation for Project 2025. I admit to being stuck on the threshold of belief. How could any American choose to go back to someone who’s hoarded classified documents in his bathroom, the image of which was splashed almost daily across the late-night monologues? However unlikely Trump’s understanding of what those classified folders reveal, he seems to have wanted them in a place where he could touch everything with his hands. It’s almost palpable the gap between his animal intuition about sleights of hand that might help him out in the future and his cognitive ability to develop a practicable strategy for achieving a goal. Among Americans who still have a conscience, his actions have triggered permanent shame—shame for the office itself but also for this compulsive shoplifter desperately seeking to validate his sense of ownership.

The years of seeing Trump’s Piscataway Venetian bathroom gave the impression that he had entered an Everglades Gothic phase of tortured resentment, with darkness descending over an otherwise sun-drenched tableau. His hoarding calls to mind what is said of Mr. Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “Everything belonged to him—but that was a trifle. The thing to know was what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. That was the reflection that made you creepy all over.” Yes, how many global powers of darkness beyond Vladimir Putin have claimed the seemingly unknowable Donald Trump for their own? He is certainly a presence that makes people feel creepy all over.

It was in a January 2018 White House meeting that Trump had famously channeled Mr. Kurtz—an ivory trader and trading post commander who abandons his morals to set himself up as a god to natives of the Congo—when he asked Republican and Democratic senators why America would want immigrants from “shithole countries” like Haiti and those in Africa. Even Republicans back then were shocked into silence. It seemed like Trump was tempting the gods of decency. After all, Mr. Kurtz dies believing that his trading company should “Exterminate all the brutes!” in the Congo.

But what a difference six years make. Trump’s millions of followers not only assume that all illegal immigrants are from shithole countries, but they believe these immigrants are eating people’s dogs and cats. Republicans have happily gone very dark on morality and civility, culminating in MAGA’s Puerto Rican hate-fest at Madison Square Garden on October 27. At the polls this November, millions more used their vote to condone words and behaviors they (supposedly) would never tolerate from their neighbors or co-workers.

It’s unfortunate that the generation of reporters who will be covering the White House doesn’t also go dark in the weeks before Trump is inaugurated. With their template of anxiously providing speculative daily filler, they are not prepared for the next four years. I do not look forward to the false expressions of shock on the faces of Anderson Cooper and Jake Tapper and do not want to see them before I have to. They don’t get that we tried the one-pot bulwark and it didn’t work. Now we have to sit tight and wait as the whole thing moves tragically forward. It makes me think of what the playwright Henrik Ibsen said about Europe in 1875: “I believe we are sailing with a corpse in our cargo.” We have to wait for the terrible executive breaches that are hurled at us, one after another after another. Only then can we commence the frustrating and casualty-laden work of fighting a ground war à la carte. §